My Five Favorite Video Games Of 2018

It’s that time, everything is out, my backlog is still enormous, but I have to make one of these lists anyway. While Forbes will be doing a grand GOTY crowning, I usually end up making a list of my personal favorite games of the year, and 2018 is no exception, as it’s been a hell of a year for releases.

While listing my favorite games of the year would seem to explicitly say this is my personal opinion, I should probably still remind everyone of that before people get mad about X or Y being too high or low or not on the list at all. My #1 was really never a doubt in my mind, and this may not be the most exciting list overall as it’s pretty “mainstream,” but man, I love these games.

Assassin's Creed OdysseyUbisoft

5. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

This is a game that has grown on me the further I’ve gotten from it. I liked it at the time, but I do think that a big part of the reason I didn’t like it more for my review was because it felt like a bit too much after Origins, another game I loved, just a year earlier.

But man, this game is great, and the main reason for that is Kassandra, one of two “optional” leads for the game next to Alexios, but really the only choice in my mind. I have never been terribly impressed with almost any AC protagonist short of Orgins’ Bayek, but Kassandra is a truly magnificent hero, part Wonder Woman, part Kratos, part Xena, all awesome. She made this game, and her story, particularly her quest to reunite her family if you make the “right” decisions, was the best emotional moment in the series to date for me.

Gameplay is a blast as AC is now embracing its new role as a full on action game. Stealth exists, but playing Kassandra as an all-out warrior seemed like the “correct” call given her Spartan heritage, and the RPG elements from armor sets to skill trees that are now in the game make this almost Diablo-like in a way, which I love. This game is long, probably too long, but incredibly enjoyable, and I really do love it.

Red Dead Redemption 2Rockstar

4. Red Dead Redemption 2

I didn’t know what to expect from Arthur Morgan heading into RDR2, as he seemed like he had the potential to be a bit of a generic, strong silent cowboy. But what Rockstar has created here with his story is nothing short of incredible, a harrowing portrait of a man who comes to terms with what he is, and what little he can do to try to make things right with his time left on the earth. RDR2 is a haunting, frustrating, tragic, enjoyable story, one of the best I’ve ever played. And it’s set in a gorgeous world full of incredible amounts of gameplay detail from skinning animations for each type of wildlife to how corpses slowly sink into muddy swamps after you kill them.

And yet you might be wondering why this game isn’t higher, as for many, this is a top 2 game, possibly even GOTY itself. For me, as gripping as the story was and as beautiful as the world was, actually playing RDR2 was frequently exhausting. Gunfights are too plentiful and just not very interesting with Rockstar’s trademark auto-aim doing all the work. The game is about 25 hours too long at the very least, and would have benefitted from a large amount of editing. And I’m almost not even counting Red Dead Online in my analysis here, given that it’s still in beta, but it’s a strange skinner box that loses the best part of RDR2, the story, in favor of endless grinding.

But the story overwhelms my issues with gameplay, and I did enjoy my experience overall. This is a beautiful game in every sense of the word, it just can often feel like a chore to actually play in many instances, which prevents it from going higher on my list here.

Spider-ManInsomniac

3. Spider-Man

Everyone has fond memories of the PS2 era Spider-Man games, so it was going to be hard to top that nostalgia for something fresh and new and fun in 2018. But Insomniac Games has come out with a superhero masterpiece in Spider-Man, a game that I enjoyed every second of while playing (insta-fail stealth missions excluded), and one that didn’t overstay its welcome like the previous two games on the list.

While Red Dead’s story is what shined, Spider-Man’s gameplay is just out-of-this-world incredible. The web-swinging system is endlessly fun and one of the only traversal systems in a game I’ve ever seen that makes you actively want to never use fast travel. Combat between Spider-Man’s moves and web powers is an absolute blast, my only complaint here being a relative lack of enemy diversity as you move through the game.

But it’s not like Spider-Man is lacking in the story department either. Even if the characters are familiar, even if we are living in a crazy awesome era of spider stories from Homecoming to Spider-Verse, the game still does a great job with all its characters, especially Peter Parker himself. This feels like the start of what is sure to be a truly excellent trilogy, and I cannot wait to see what’s next.

Destiny 2Bungie

2. Destiny 2: Forsaken

If you follow my writing, you knew I wasn’t going to get through this list without including Destiny. Destiny 2, like Destiny 1, has undergone its fair share of struggles, with its vanilla launch and first DLC being relative disappointments. But around the Warmind era, things started to turn around, and after the Forsaken expansion launched this fall, Destiny 2 officially became better than Destiny 1 ever was, in almost every way.

Destiny 2 has made exotics feel power, it’s crafted engaging story content for once, it’s filled the game with mysteries for the community to uncover, it’s altered progression so that it works for almost every type of player, no matter what kind of activity you want to play. And above all else, it’s still the best-feeling shooter on the market by a wide margin. All of this adds up to the reason I’m currently at 700 hours of Destiny 2 played, more than I ever put into D1, and 400 of that is probably this fall alone since Forsaken launched. I just cannot stop playing, and Bungie has executed a fantastic turnaround here for the second time in the series’ lifespan.

Is there still stuff wrong with Destiny? Of course there is, there always will be, and I’m writing about some new issue or another every other day. But that’s just how it works, and we’ve moved from “the game has deep, horrible issues” to “wouldn’t it be nice if this was fixed/added,” which is an entirely different thing. Destiny 2 is my spirit game, and so far Year 2 feels like it’s going to keep me engaged until whatever big new content addition drops next fall.

God of WarSony

1. God of War

It was always going to be God of War. As soon as I finished the game, I knew that this was almost certainly going to be my Game of the Year, and quite honestly, it’s the best game I’ve played in several years.

I am simply amazed at what Sony Santa Monica did with this franchise. I’ve always liked the God of War games, but they felt like they were running out of steam near the end. If they did return, it seemed like Kratos would simply move from killing all the Greek gods to killing all the Norse gods and so on and so forth, and yet what God of War did this year is transform not only the series with new gameplay, but the character of Kratos himself, now once again a father, one struggling with his violent past as he tries to make a better life for his child.

The storytelling and voicework here are just phenomenal, adding a richness to Kratos I never expected to see in a late-series sequel like this. His relationship with Atreus is fantastic, and develops beautifully over the course of the game.

But God of War is a full trifecta. The story is great, but it’s also one of the most beautiful games of this generation, which is saying a lot, and gameplay is incredibly fun as well. If we were giving out “mechanic of the year” awards, the Thor’s hammer-like Leviathan Axe would be right up there with Spider-Man’s web swinging. It’s a wonder of game design and action combat, and it’s amazing how much has changed about God of War for this installment while somehow it still feels like a God of War game as you play.

This is truly a contender for Game of the Generation, and I do not say that lightly. I was waiting until year’s end to see if anything could top it, but in my eyes, nothing even came close, it’s just on an entirely different level.